Over My Dead Body
by VegetaCold
Summary: Vlad decides to force Danny to join him, and goes to extreme measures to do so.
1. Chapter 1

Danny Phantom let out a scream of pain as an ectoplasmic energy blast collided with his chest. He staggered backward, gasping for breath, as his opponent, Vlad Plasmius, charged at him, another blast in his hands, ready to be fired. He did fire it, and his aim was exact; the blast collided into Danny who had not moved from where he was leaning against the concrete guardrail of the bridge their fight had taken root for support. He was clutching his injured chest, and ectoplasm oozed between his fingers and dripped onto the cracked, weather-beaten pavement. His breathing was heavy, the air being pulled in in long, weary sighs. His head was heavy, and everything had taken on an eerie, nightmarish slowness and an unclear haze.

There seemed to be no word to describe the extent of pain that he felt. None would be severe enough to describe it exactly. Because he didn't think he'd ever been beaten as badly as he was now in all of his ghost-fighting career, let alone by Vlad. He'd come to believe that Vlad did care about him some, and thus when they fought he tended to be more gentle than some ghosts…most ghosts, in fact. Perhaps it was safer to say _all _ghosts, because none were so tediously gentle as he. But then, none had intentions like he did. They wanted Danny Phantom out of the picture, but in Vlad's case it was the opposite. It seemed that he, more than anything, wanted Danny _in_ the picture.

In convincing Danny to join him, or at least attempting to, he did not stand by and simply ask Danny to do so. He liked to first establish that his powers were in fact the dominate, unprecedented of the two, which he did by challenging Danny. While his aim was never to kill, he liked to rough Danny up some as means of further convincing him to join him. He strived to establish an ultimatum for Daniel which was more or less true: join me or die. And while this had so far proved ineffective, Danny knew how prideful Vlad was and was sure he was unable to admit that, yes, he had made a miscalculation–this strategy was hopeless. So he would keep trying, attempting to prove it to himself so he did not have to taste defeat. This was, of course, what seemed to be Vlad's objective for today.

Danny's head was numb, his mind unable to think. He felt as if he were underwater, at the bottom of some monster-ridden ocean, his skull shattering as the water pressure bore down on him and he struggled to breathe at the same time. And while his body was in so much pain that it pleaded to quit, to fall to the ground and give into unconsciousness at Vlad's feet and be vulnerable to whatever he had planned for him, his mind was not numb enough to allow for this to happen. He was still acutely aware of the consequences this action held, and he was determined to hold his ground. But he did not know how long it would be until his body took control over his mind and he found himself in that position exactly.

The other blast hit him squarely in the chest once again, followed by Vlad's gloved fist as it was driven into his stomach. Danny staggered backward, but managed to stay upright, still leaning against the concrete walls of the bridge, his hands clawing at it like a lifeline. Vlad smiled condescendingly as he took a step away from Danny and seemed to back down for the time being, for which Danny found himself extremely grateful. Vlad watched interestedly in silence as Danny attempted to regain some composure—that was, if he'd had any to begin with—as he managed to steady himself enough to step away from the guardrail and assume some sort of weak fighting stance.

Vlad laughed at him scornfully. "Oh please, Daniel, don't tell me you're going to continue resisting me?"

A low growl escaped Danny's clenched teeth. He cleared his throat and spat at Vlad's feet in disgust and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand in a barbaric manner. Vlad noted briefly the blood intermingled with his phlegm. The back of Daniel's silver glove on his right hand was smeared with blood.

"I'm always going to resist you, Vlad," he hissed, his teeth clenched again, eyes burning with fury, "no matter what you try."

"I wouldn't be so sure, Daniel," Vlad said confidently.

"You know you won't ever get me to join you and you're too prideful to admit it."

"Oh, but there really isn't anything to admit. You'll join me. You know everything _I've _said is true, but _you're _too prideful to admit it. You know that you're unhappy. Your father and mother swoon over your sister for her achievements and don't give you the time of day. When they do, the only thing they say is how poorly you perform in school and how you're letting your life go down the drain. They compare you to her, don't they? Because you're not the best in math and science and literature they look down on you, don't they, Danny? But what gives them that right? After all, they are the ones who gave you these powers which are your main distraction when it comes to school, aren't they? You have no time to study or do your work or even be present at school because you're so busy fighting ghosts, which, of course, are ghosts they couldn't catch themselves. Isn't that right, Danny? You're left to clean up their messes time and time again, and what do you get in return? Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing but abuse. And it's not just your parents, is it? You're looked down upon by the whole town as well. You've saved so many people and all you've ever gotten were cold stares and the title of "villain". You come home from these fights, fatigued, depressed. You've got no one to bandage your wounds or help you in any way. You lay in bed at night wallowing in pain until you fall asleep for a few hours before another ghost comes up or you've got to get up for school, where you can hardly keep yourself awake, only to have to take a test and fail it because you didn't have time to study. Haven't you ever wondered _why_, Daniel? Haven't you ever wondered if there was something better? That is what I've been trying to offer you. I don't understand how you can resist," Vlad said, and his voice was soft with understanding and what reminded Danny vaguely of compassion, but he would not be dissuaded.

"Even if any of that were true, I wouldn't want anything from _you_. Get that through your head and get out of my town," he said, even though he knew it was all true, all of it. And that was what made it so hard for him when he asked him to join him, because it made Danny feel that Vlad knew much more about him than he did himself, and that they were so alike in the sense that they could both understand each other, which was a relationship Danny wanted to be able to say he had with someone. It made Danny begin to believe that perhaps Vlad did know what was best for him and could give that to him. And it was so tempting, the idea of it. It also brought such guilty comfort to him on those nights that Vlad spoke of, as he lay in bed convulsing in pain. To know that there was a way out was the only thing that set his mind at rest anymore. And he wanted more than anything to have that escape. He'd thought about it, contemplated the possibility when he became desperate enough. Once he had almost left his bedroom with the intent of going to Wisconsin to Vlad's ghostly manor, but in the end had gone back to bed, because he'd realized the one thing that would deter him from doing so. It was not an angel who wanted to provide him escape; it was Vlad, and that changed everything. He might hate what his life had become, but he did not hate it enough that he would go so far as becoming what he had taken an oath he wouldn't—evil. Joining him would mean abandoning his morals, everything he stood for, and becoming just that, because he knew Vlad and everything he stood for and knew that he would try to turn him into that as well. So he would resist, though he knew, truthfully, that he really didn't deserve to.

"Daniel…"

"You had better not ask me to join you. I won't. Understand?"

"Fine, Danny. In all honesty, I don't plan to ask you anymore," Vlad said, smiled, and turned away and began to walk in the opposite direction. Then he said without turning around, "I suppose I'll have to force you. But I won't let you put yourself through this hellishness any longer because of your own stubbornness. You'll join me soon, Danny, and you'll find it such a relief to have a new father."

"Over my dead body!"

Vlad turned around, and on his face he wore a grin like the Cheshire Cat's. "Believe me, little badger, that can be arranged easily," he spoke in a low, confident tone that was brimming with uncontrolled excitement just below the surface.

Danny's eyes widened as he stared at Vlad, who only continued to smile at him.

"Well, this has been entertaining as usual, Daniel. It seems that each time I see you you're a little bit stronger, more practiced, shall we say? You continue to impress me as always." He turned away and waved his hand. "Keep up the good work."

As Vlad flew into the air and headed in the opposite direction, Danny called after him, "Fuck you, Vlad!"

"You too, Danny!" Vlad called back cheerfully before disappearing from Danny's sight.

Danny sighed in aggravation, turned back into his human self, and collapsed onto the pavement without pause.

"_Great_," he sighed, looking at his electric scooter which seemed to be sitting miles away while it was only a few feet.

He staggered to his feet slowly, gripping the guardrail, only to fall to the ground once again.

He cursed loudly enough that it seemed plausible that Vlad, who was already halfway to Wisconsin, could have heard it.


	2. Waiting

A/N: Simply an interlude chapter, but it is not directly related to the current plot. I simply wanted to stress Danny's lonliness especially before I tackled the next chapters, so this does have a point. Please enjoy.

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><p>Danny Fenton lay in his bed in his darkened bedroom. Looming shadows shifted as the eerie light of late night traffic and all its accompanying light, along with the hustle and bustle of the night life in the downtown area of Amity, cast through the undrawn blinds of his window. As the shadows danced and transformed before his eyes in that darkened space, a sense of foreboding loomed over him.<p>

On these nights, he was alone in this house. Jazz was a senior at Casper High high school, and unsurprisingly—though unnecessary, Danny thought—she had been obsessing over her college education since she'd been a freshman three years earlier. It really wasn't necessary, considering she would be able to get into any school she wanted, and she did. She had spent the better part of that year filling out applications for several different colleges and had been accepted to every one. Her parents had been touring the colleges frequently with her for the past few months. They did not want Danny to come along, which they had told him themselves without an ounce of remorse for having to do so. He did not remember which college they were at tonight, but they wouldn't be coming home any time so.

He lay here in this bedroom, alone in this empty house, which held no warmth, no comfort. He clutched the covers to his chest, trying to gain something. Trying to gain a peaceful slumber, peace of mind, but he felt as if he had just seen the most frightening horror movie, and his heart was perched in his throat, clogging his windpipe, suffocating him. He kept expecting the shadows that danced around him to spring, to morph into some hideous monster and to consume him, and he wished they would. The anticipation was the worst. He knew whatever was there was there, and continuously he gave it cues; it will come out now, he thought, don't let it surprise you.

He wanted to leave this haunted place. If someone had questioned him of it, he would never have been able to explain it, but here, in this bedroom in the late hours of the night, it felt unsafe. In this upstairs bedroom, he felt as if his only purpose were to wait for whatever was downstairs to make its way up here. Something, lurking beneath him, and all he could do was wait for it to come. He felt as if he were trapped in some especially confined space, near this deformed creature but far enough away that there was time to wait, anticipate. In this upstairs bedroom, which seemed so far down the hallway from the stairs, an impossible trek to make, it seemed as if time had stopped, but not for those on the outside. It was as if he'd become a vague memory, a forgotten existence, to those just beyond his window because his life had stopped but theirs had not. He felt dead.

He felt like this during these long nights without his family, without any comfort or ease. His body was always battered and broken from his fights with the ghosts, those uncompassionate ghosts, who took so much pleasure in hurting him because they knew he had no means of escaping the pain. When it was too much to handle, he laid in his darkened upstairs bedroom and watched the shadows dance on his walls, waited for the monster to reveal itself.

On these nights, he thought of Vlad, the escape he'd offered. But until morning, he was captive to his bedroom.


	3. Wandering

On the mornings after these long, seemingly endless nights, Danny Fenton roamed the town in the early hours, when the sun was just beginning to peek out from behind the hills and the air was crisp and chilly. The streets were quiet and empty but the town did not feel abandoned; it was, with its inhabitance, drifting quietly in and out of consciousness, in and out of reality, and he could feel this presence in each of the crumbling brick buildings that lined the streets. He realized that when you were asleep this was nothing special; it was a normal sleep from which you woke, not yet quite awake, and did not classify as anything out of the ordinary. But this, wandering these streets in the early hours of the morning, was dreaming awake. He felt these people, these slumbering, dreaming people wandering the all too real streets with him, and realized that, he, too, was teetering on the edge of reality, between consciousness and that place of dreams. This, he knew easily, was something special; this was a special _place_, and it was his place, and his place alone, because no one else was ever awake to join him. He had this place, he came to believe, because he braved those long nights alone in his bedroom, where there was nothing but coldness and fear. This, he thought, was his reward, like a rainbow after a bad rain-storm. And this was what made those nights bearable, the knowledge that he could dream awake until souls left the streets and _people _flooded them, headed off to school and work and wherever else it was they went.

One morning, however, Danny was not the only one wandering. Danny had, on the contrary, his foggy landscape to himself as usual, because this other wanderer lived very far away, and he did not take to his own streets as Danny did. Instead, he wandered about his lab, not dreaming awake, not dreaming at all, but simply _awake_, and working. He was building a box; it was oblong, and the outside was made of metal. The inside, however, was lined with soft black velvet. On his workstation, there was a notepad on which measurements were scribbled. Near the top was written with a neat, steady hand, "_Daniel Fenton, 5'4._" He measured the box with a retractable tape measure.

"5'8, four inches of room."

He smiled.

That afternoon, long after the town had risen from its dreamy slumber, Danny Fenton walked out of Casper High with the expression of tired dejection he usually wore plastered on his face. He walked away from the excitement and bustle of the town as parents arrived home from work and kids got let out of school, because that was not something that appealed to him, that _liveliness_. He was content to wandering with those souls so similar to his own, but he found that wandering with _people _was something he could not do if he did not have to, and he didn't—his parents, of course, had not returned yet with Jazz and he was left on his own for yet another night. Tomorrow was Saturday, which meant that the town, of course, would be bustling tonight. And he did not want to go back to that, nor did he want to go back to that house. He decided that since he did not need to report to school the next morning, and since his parents were not due back until Monday or Tuesday—he still had school then, but being that Jazz was a senior, she had the upcoming week, along with the previous week, off to prepare for college in the fall—he decided he would stay out that night without reporting home. He did not think he would need anything, and being Danny Phantom, he was not worried about anything happening to him, about being jumped or murdered or God knew what else.

So, that day after school let out, he did not go home. Instead, he stopped at the Nasty Burger, alone, and had what he told himself was dinner. Afterward, he walked behind the building, crouched behind a dumpster, and changed into Danny Phantom, and took to the skies. He spent the better part of that afternoon flying over the grassy hills and forests and lakes that neighbored the town that neighbored the town that neighbored Amity, feeling free and at ease and peace. At some point, he flew down and landed beside one of the lakes he had flown over previously. He sat down on the grassy ledge that bordered the lake, turned back into Danny Fenton, kicked off his shoes, put his toes in the water, and skipped rocks. After a good fifteen or twenty minutes of this, Danny decided to go exploring in the woods that neighbored the lake.

When he entered the woods, the wanderer began following him.

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><p>Vegeta: That first paragraph made no sense! Are you HIGH? I even read it over another time trying to understand it and couldn't make a lick of sense of it!<p>

VC: Not high, just lazy.


	4. Searching

Danny had only taken a few steps into the woods when he sensed this presence behind him, the presence of the wanderer. He paused, his body rigid with fear, his heart racing and caught in his throat. For some time, which seemed to the battered teenage boy an eternity but was, in actuality, only a few minutes, he did not turn around to confirm his fears. When he did, it was not on impulse, was not, "I'll turn on the count of three. One, two—"; Danny Fenton turned on command.

The wanderer spoke.

His voice was not particularly frightening in itself. It was not the whisper of a ghost—hushed but chilling—or the drunken grumble of a rapist. It was, if in another context, almost cheerful, welcoming. However, in the darkening, deserted forest, the voice was twisted and warped, mutating as the shadows in his bedroom did. What was once a tree was now a deadly hand ready to snatch him from beneath the covers. This voice was carried in the hush of leaves and hurried through foxholes and deadfalls and altered, mutilated in the process, until it reached Danny.

And it sounded then oh so vicious.

"_Daniel_," the wind moaned. "_Why out so laaaaaaate_?"

Danny whipped around, fueled more than anything by untamed anger, as if he were furious that the wanderer should invade his woods rather than frightened by this itself.

"What do you want, Vlad?" he hissed at the wind, trying to appear composed though he was terrified and his heart and head were racing.

The wind replied, unfazed, all-knowing, befriending his terror, "_I've come to put you to bed, Daniel_."

"Put me to bed?" Danny stuttered, frankly confused.

"_Yes. It's late. Boys your age should be sleeping_."

Most of Danny's fear and anger had been replaced by bewilderment and incomprehension. He realized, almost immediately, that this was due mainly to the fact that he could not fit these words to the wanderer's lips, as if he were on a show that had been previously recorded and the dialogue hadn't quite been matched with the characters' mouths correctly. It was not even so much the sheer strangeness of the statement itself but simply the fact that the wanderer should not be saying it.

"Vlad, the sun hasn't set yet."

"_It's dark where I'll take you. It's always dark there_."

This sent a shiver down Danny's spine, one that ran deep and chilled his soul. He could only begin to imagine what the wanderer meant by this, but he thought it safer—for his own sanity, at least—not to inquire. Instead, he said, "You're not taking me anywhere, Vlad."

"_Yes, I am. To bed_."

"What?"

"_I've built a bed for you, Daniel. I worked on it all night._"

"What are you talking about?"

"_A nice bed, Daniel. A good place for a nice long rest_."

"Rest?"

"_Yes, Daniel, you're going to rest for awhile. And when you wake up, I promise, things will be better_."

Danny only had a moment to consider this before he felt a small sharp prick in the back of his neck. Unconsciousness took him, and he collapsed effortlessly into the wanderer's waiting arms, unresponsive.

Vlad dragged him out of the woods.

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><p>He had just begun preparing the body when his old-fashioned phone sounded in the study above his laboratory. He left the teenager lying on the cold metal table in the center of the large, almost futuristic room and went upstairs. His cat, Maddie, greeted him when he reached the top of the stairs. He scooped her up, carried her to the table where his phone resided on the wall above it, and set her on the table's marble surface.<p>

He took off the pair of latex gloves he wore and picked up the phone.

"Hello," he said into it, smiling to himself. "How may I help you?"

"Yes," the voice said, a woman's voice, one that was frantic but trying to come off as composed. "Vlad, this is Maddie."

He grinned. "Maddie, my dear, it's been such a long time since we've talked. How are you?"

"Oh, not good, I'm afraid. You know we've been visiting colleges with Jazz—"

"Yes."

"—and we left Danny at home—"

"Yes."

"—and we haven't heard from him since Thursday night. I've been calling him and calling him and he hasn't answered his phone."

"You must be worried sick," he said simply, his tone routinely emotionless and mundane.

"Well, yes. I'm afraid he might have run away. I don't think he was too happy with us when we left."

"Oh, I'm sure he's fine."

There was a pause, and then she said timidly, her voice almost shameful, "Would you…"

"Go looking for him?"

"If you could. We're having some problems with the RV and we can't make it back any earlier than we had originally planned."

He smiled to himself and winked at his cat habitually, patting her on the head. "Of course, Maddie, my love, I'd be happy to."

"Thank you so much, Vlad," the voice replied with a sigh of relief. "If you see him, give us a call."

"Of course. And if I do see him, I'd be happy to watch over him until you return."

"That would be great."

"I'll start searching right away, my dear," he purred, smirking. "I'll find him."

"Thank you so much, Vlad. You're a lifesaver," she said in return, and hung up.

He smiled at Maddie, put the phone down, picked her the cat up, and set her on the ground. He put his latex gloves back on and went back down to his laboratory, muttering to himself, "_Perfect_."


	5. Goodbyes and Goodnights

"I want to recognize the man who funded this funeral," Jack Fenton said softly, looking solemnly out across the rows of folding chairs that had been set up on the grass by the site of his son's grave, looking but not _connecting_. "Vlad, you've…you've always been there for us whenever we've needed it most, and I don't think I could have pulled together the money for this. You're the greatest friend I've ever had, and I just want to thank you."

Vlad Masters, sitting in one of the folding chairs beside a weeping Maddie Fenton, nodded gently to him, and then slowly—and almost guiltily—turned his attention back to the boy who lay in the sleek metal box, his face tranquil, his smooth, young hands clasped gently over his chest. Inside the coffin, an electronic device of Tucker's and one of Sam's favorite bracelets, along with an unorthodox jumble of trinkets and mementos many of the thousand or so people—the entire town in all its glory—who'd come to the funeral had so willingly contributed.

The boy's school had come, despite the fact that he had had none more than two friends and played no sports nor won competitions. Paulina and Star were weeping. The football team, who'd become notorious for going out of their way to torment the boy, placed the football that derived from their only winning game that season beside him in his coffin; Dash Baxter did the honors and walked away with his hands in his pockets afterward, slumped over, looking ashamed…and saddened beyond belief.

That cloudy afternoon in the cemetery, all but one sang for him.

Vlad Masters sat there amid the song of the mourners and stared down at the boy who lay so peacefully in his coffin and watched his hand twitch.

A smile tugged at the corners of the man's mouth.

When the line of onlookers filing past the coffin had diminished and the parade of cars parked alongside the cemetery on the moss-eaten street had gone, Vlad approached the coffin, where Tucker and Sam were both freely crying as they looked down into it, entangled within one another for comfort.

When they looked up and saw him, Sam Manson hissed softly, tears running down her fair cheeks in rivers, "I bet you're happy now, Vlad." With this, she tore out of Tucker's grip and ran down the hill on which served the site of the child's grave, weeping. Tucker ran after her, only pausing to look at Vlad for a small moment, a deep frown plastered onto his face.

Watching the boy in his blue funeral suit run after the darkly dressed girl in an attempt to calm her, Vlad Masters said into the emptiness that inhabited the air around him, still smiling gently, "You have no idea."

Mr. and Mrs. Fenton and their daughter were preoccupied with the priest, and so Vlad stood alone on the hill by the steel box and looked down at the sleeping teenager. He touched the sparsely twitching hand to silence it.

"No, my little badger," he spoke to the boy quietly. "You mustn't. Not here. For all they know, you've been dead for over a week. You drowned in that pretty little lake while you were skipping stones. I've told you that."

When he was sure no one was watching, he removed a glistening needle from the pocket of his coat, one which was filled with an unidentified clear liquid, and injected it into the boy's neck. His twitching hand immediately grew still.

"There we are," he said, silently tucking the needle back away in its hiding place. "That should calm those overactive nerves of yours, at least until we can get you buried."

For a moment he tenderly caressed the boy's silenced hands, smiling down at him gently. "It won't be long now, my little badger," he reassured the dead boy. "I promise, so you promise me you'll be good and patient until then."

He got no answer, but he seemed satisfied all the same. He patted the boy's hands before reassembling them in their dead-man pose over his chest.

"Soon, my little badger," he said. "I'll see you very soon. Okay?"

Without waiting for a response, he turned away and went to join what remained of the Fenton family where they were gathered around the priest, being reassured by the word of God.

Vlad Masters, however, did not need God; he had a reassurance of his own.


	6. Jud

The family sat around the two card tables that had been set up in the living room of their home and covered half-heartedly with a paper table cloth resembling one that might be used at a child's birthday party—it was yellow with metallic blue and red balloons—because they did not own anything that might have been more appropriate, and the irony of this struck the Fenton's with a fierceness that could only be described as being alien—it should not have been strange that this small town family be virgin to such unyielding pain, but they felt as though there was fault lying in them for being so _inexperienced_ as they were. One might wonder, however, how one could _want _to be granted the know-how of something so untouchably morbid, for it was not as if they were climbing Everest or toying with medical advances in the field of cancer; they could not say they would have packed warmer clothes or paid more attention to a specific piece of information sooner—rather, they were regretting their abandonment of their late son, which was something they could not undo or do over, and would inevitably lead to his relatively mysterious death in the depths of the lake that bordered their little town, like them, very virgin to such tragedy. No, the parents should not wish this pain upon themselves, but in the midst of a death one can only wish they'd tackled the sorrow they now felt prior so their suffering might be minimized. And this, perhaps more strongly than they desired anything else—other than the return of their son, of course—the Fenton's did.

At the table with them was their daughter, Jazz, whose hair was tousled, her signature blue headband abandoned. The dark eye makeup she'd applied prior to the funeral was now smeared across her cheeks in long black streaks; her red lipstick had run, and all that remained was some that had caked in the crevices of her abnormally dry lips. She still wore the black dress she'd donned in the early hours of the morning, but now her bra-straps had slid down her soft shoulders and her skirt was disheveled so that her panties—solid-colored and painfully simple, because she was not the type of girl to spend hundreds of dollars on undergarments as her schoolmates Paulina and Star might—were rendered exposed. The pantyhose she wore had long runs down their length, because her fingers could not be controlled as she watched her baby brother being committed to the earth in a short metal coffin; it seemed that by raking her well-kept but unmanicured nails across her thighs she was retaining something that resembled restraint, which she practiced continuously and which would keep her from jumping out of her seat and lunging at the coffin with her arms open in a pathetic attempt to prevent its impending descent into the cold, worm-ridden ground.

The girl's eyes were bloodshot, and behind the veil of hardened makeup her face was red from hours of ceaseless weeping. Now, however, they were dry and her face was sullen, overcome with exhaustion, because she had, upon returning from the cemetery, taken a sedative at the request of Vlad Masters, and had retreated to her bedroom to sleep for almost four hours. Her mother had done likewise; Jack, however, had sat up with Vlad at the kitchen table, staring down at the piles of photographs which derived from the bulk of the his dead son's life and swallowing beer at an alarmingly rapid pace—_especially_ if you were to consider that Jack Fenton had not touched a drop of the stuff since he'd been in college. Vlad had; he drank heavily after every football game he'd ever attended, whether the Packers came away victorious or with a disappointing loss beneath there belt, and therefore was able to swallow the alcohol Jack willingly offered up with ease, although he'd promised himself that he would not have more than five (by the fifth, he could begin to feel the alcohol consuming him) so as to avoid becoming drunk and doing something that would hinder his plans—say, laughing about the ease at which they'd conceived the idea of the boy's death, or how shocked Daniel would be when he woke up in another fifty years, disoriented and horror-stricken but physically unaltered. He would not surpass this limit he'd set for himself, even though they remained in the kitchen for at least three hours and surrounded by at least forty bottles of good beer, reminiscing in the memory of their deceased son and nephew.

Vlad had not planned originally to reside at the Fenton home to take part in the residual grief of that week's events, because the sight of his beloved Maddie in such undiluted pain was one that induced a kind of sadness of its own, but he was also bestowed with the knowledge that if it were not for his presence, the family would lapse into something of anarchy; there was no telling what Jasmine and Maddie might do if left to their own devices, and Vlad knew that a sullen Jack would be in no condition to prevent them from doing what they willed. Vaguely, Vlad could see Maddie running to the cemetery in the late hours of the night, insisting that her son was not dead as she had since she'd first laid eyes on his unmoving body on a metal slab in the mortuary and that he should be exhumed. More disturbing, he saw the events of the coming days playing out as those in the novel by Stephen King, Pet Sematary—though Jack had been carried into a state of calmness by countless bottles of beer, there was no certainty that his pain had not driven him into something of madness and that he wouldn't attempt to penetrate the too-bright green turf that had been planted on Danny's burial plot with the blade of a shovel and remove him from the earth. Though such an idea seemed grossly disrespectful, it was not implausible by any means—Vlad knew better than anyone how the limbic system walked hand-in-hand with undying grief and caused the body to act as it might never normally. And of course, if the man were to tamper with the intricately constructed hardware he'd placed beneath the boy's skin—if it came into contact with any foreign substance such as metal (it was like a magnet, in reality) or shifted in the slightest, it would certainly malfunction—Daniel might regain consciousness. And of course, if this were to happen, not only would his plans for the future be crushed into pieces that would be too small to be put back together again, but he would be charged with murder—Danny's body had, after all, been "examined" by a coroner _he'd _employed (or so he told the Fenton's, but in truth he had been the only one to touch the body, even taking pains to dress him in a silk suit he'd ordered from India which would not irritate his hardware and make him look really very stunning at the same time, while the mortuary simply provided for a convincing backdrop) . He was certain that Danny's powers would also be discovered if they were to find that he was alive, because the hardware was a compilation of the boy's genetic make-up—he had, of course, finally decoded the DNA of Daniel's mid-morph but was no longer appeased by the idea of creating a clone—and anyone who possessed this information would be bestowed with the secret of his alias, and his own, as well, because in the process of creating the hardware that had enabled his plan to work so flawlessly he had implemented some of his own DNA to stabilize Daniel's; he knew that Danny was still inexperienced in that he had not achieved complete mastery of his powers and often struggled to keep them from emerging unconsciously, and he had theorized that introducing some of his own (more stable) DNA would minimize the possibility that the boy's ghost powers would act up and he might, say, turn intangible as he lay in his coffin before the sea of family and friends that had come to mourn his untimely death. Of course, this was less than ideal, because Vlad had come to learn—painfully throughout the entirety of his days since that fateful night in the lab with Jack and Maddie—how closed-minded society was to such deformities, and they would surely be hunted. To ensure that the boy stay in his box should he wake up to eliminate all chance of such a thing unfolding, Vlad had built Danny's coffin with a sort of ecto-repellent, but in reality the man did not think it would be an issue; the hardware, along with the task of monitoring his heart-rate and breathing, was implemented with the sleep-inducing substance Vlad had harvested from a ghost named Nocturne, who specialized in the subject of sleep and possessed the vivid power to lull any being he chose into unconsciousness with his rather advanced technology. If he'd come to understand the ghost well enough, the hardware Nocturne used sent signals to the brain which fooled the neurons into believing it was time to retreat into sleep no matter how light or warm it may be outside; the one being put to sleep, Nocturne had quickly admitted when faced with another of Vlad Plasmius' energy-blasts, could only be woken when the hardware was reprogrammed with such instructions.

"Sometimes one is strong enough to overcome this power and awaken when they please," Nocturne had told the sour-faced man who stood before him, his hand glowing a bright fuchsia. "It does not happen often, but I have seen it."

Upon taking this into consideration, he'd revamped the coffin, but the unease that had formulated in his rather compulsive mind at the consequences of Daniel's escape did not subside for quite some time, and though it was less than ideal, Vlad realized that it would perhaps be best to keep an eye on Jack and kin and the burial plot of his favorite half-ghost—like every other aspect of the funeral, he'd financed the gravestone, purchasing the most beautiful and in ordinance with what he believed Danny would have liked best if he had really been a corpse, and though he knew it was a considerable amount of money to spend on something that was nothing more than an elaborate play, he also knew that the love he would gain in the end was worth more than any amount of money the world could offer—until the death had blown over…or he'd been in the ground long enough for his mother and father to give up any hope that he might still be alive. Of course, it would be a long several weeks of donning a mask of faux grief constantly, of playing homemaker while the Fenton's recovered, but if it meant getting the one thing he wanted most in this miniscule world we live, he would.

"I'd like to propose a toast," he said now, standing up from the folding chair in which he sat with his plastic cup of lemon-lime soda in hand. Raising it, he continued softly, "To Daniel."

Jazz and Maddie remained unmoving but nodded in agreement, their faces showing no trace of emotion now. Jack raised his plastic cup of root-beer—like Vlad, he'd made himself a drinking promise as well—he would not consume it in front of them—and nodded. "To Danny," he murmured, and he, too, was void of all emotion.

Because they were all looking down at the picture that had been placed on the table of Jazz pulling Danny in a little red wagon when they'd both been very young, Vlad Masters found he could unleash the smile he'd been suppressing since dinner had begun with great difficulty; trying to keep from chuckling, however, was a much more difficult matter, and it would not go unseen, but he managed to speak without committing such an offense: "Our little badger will always live on, you must remember. That, I can _assure_ you."


End file.
